- conformity and Google, defense and spying (China knows prob almost all our "secrets")
- in the past you could just find new things faster than people could reverse-engineer. part of the problem is that innovation is slowing down today (part of the reason for convergence by China/developing world).
- introgression from archaics of various kinds
- mutational load and IQ, wrath of khan neanderthal
- trade and antiquity (not that useful besides ideas tbh), Roman empire, disease, smallpox
- spices needed to be grown elsewhere, but besides that...
- analogy: caste system in India (why no Brahmin car repairmen?), slavery in Greco-Roman times, more water mills in medieval times (rivers better in north, but still could have done it), new elite not liking getting hands dirty, low status of engineers, rise of finance
- crookery in finance, hedge fund edge might be substantially insider trading
- long-term wisdom of moving all manufacturing to China...?
- economic myopia: British financialization before WW1 vis-a-vis Germany. North vs. South and cotton/industry, camels in Middle East vs. wagons in Europe
- Western medicine easier to convert to science than Eastern, pseudoscience and wrong theories better than bag of recipes
- Greeks definitely knew some things that were lost (eg, line in Pliny makes reference to combinatorics calculation rediscovered by German dude much later. think he's referring to Catalan numbers?), Lucio Russo book
- Indo-Europeans, Western Europe, Amerindians, India, British Isles, gender, disease, and conquest
- no farming (Dark Age), then why were people still farming on Shetland Islands north of Scotland?
- "symbolic" walls, bodies with arrows
- family stuff, children learning, talking dog, memory and aging
- Chinese/Japanese writing difficulty and children learning to read
- Hatfield-McCoy feud: the McCoy family was actually a case study in a neurological journal. they had anger management issues because of cancers of their adrenal gland (!!).

the Chinese know...: https://macropolo.org/casting-off-real-beijings-cryptic-warnings-finance-taking-economy/
Over the last couple of years, a cryptic idiom has crept into the way China’s top leaders talk about risks in the country’s financial system: tuo shi xiang xu (脱实向虚), which loosely translates as “casting off the real for the empty.” Premier Li Keqiang warned against it at his press conference at the end of the 2016 National People’s Congress (NPC). At this year’s NPC, Li inserted this very expression into his annual work report. And in April, while on an inspection tour of Guangxi, President Xi Jinping used the term, saying that China must “unceasingly promote industrial modernization, raise the level of manufacturing, and not allow the real to be cast off for the empty.”

Such an odd turn of phrase is easy to overlook, but it belies concerns about a significant shift in the way that China’s economy works. What Xi and Li were warning against is typically called financialization in developed economies. It’s when “real” companies—industrial firms, manufacturers, utility companies, property developers, and anyone else that produces a tangible product or service—take their money and, rather than put it back into their businesses, invest it in “empty”, or speculative, assets. It occurs when the returns on financial investments outstrip those in the real economy, leading to a disproportionate amount of money being routed into the financial system.

hmmm, shit:
Well, if we’re looking at the very recent trends over the last couple of decades, there is not much evidence that there’s been a bigger return to IQ than there used to be. I think there’s moderate evidence that there’s actually an increase in return to personality-type skills.

One of my colleagues one said offhand a line that I think others have said, which is that 90% of success is staying off the Internet. And I think there’s something to this idea that the return to personality-type measures is probably a lot higher than it used to be. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, especially in certain settings. I’ve looked at the normal statistical results and they don’t find an increase in return to IQ in recent decades. But there’s a couple of studies out there that do find an increase in returns to what they call non-cognitive skills.

I think personality might be mattering more. If the robots are going to take some jobs, they’ll probably be taking a lot of brainy type jobs. But they’re going to be a little behind the times when it comes to personality. And a lot of in-person services are going to depend on personality traits.

more:
So Google and its many spinoffs replace a lot of the need for crystallized intelligence. But the need for fluid intelligence is going to be with us for quite some time. The ability to look at a new, novel situation and figure out what’s going on here.

Some pro-IQ supporters, especially on the Internet, tend to think that there’s this some kind of cutoff where above a certain level IQ matters a lot. Below it, it doesn’t matter very much. And I just don’t find evidence of that. I think that there’s a reason why the market pays for IQ, for higher IQ across the range of the scores. It’s because it’s always good to have somebody around who can just look at an ambiguous situation and figure out what’s going on.

another neat comment:
I think the obsession with years of education really needs to end. And there should be an obsession with broad based test scores. If people don’t want to use IQ scores, that’s fine. But they should at least be looking at broad based test scores, things like the NAEPs, other test scores that the US government is quite happy to report on the Department of Education’s website. These should be the measures we look at. We should be looking a lot less at years of education.